Monday, June 18, 2012

Swords & Sorcery versus Dungeons & Dragons

For me it brings up dusty windblown cities on the edge of the desert with the ruined piles of the past dotting the landscape. Something like our world's Mesopotamia. Where the characters are mostly fighter and thief types.

1) Reduced presence of magic and reduction in its combat usefulness.2) No or at least rare demihumans3) Fewer monsters and almost no "type" monsters.4) Exploration not a typical goal. Dungeons are impediments to goals, not the goal themselves.5) Smaller party groups, in general.

Perhaps I got the wrong impression, but for me, a "D&Dish" setting is a "S&Wish" setting where things are taken for granted. Elves: eldrith fey folk of deadly warriors, or just a bunch of pointy-eared people? Wizards: strage dabblers of the occult, or helpful provider of discount magic rings?

In S&S, magic has a significant cost. In D&D, it's just a tool. This extends to much else: elves are, if present at all, alien and inscrutable denizens of the hidden world in S&S, just another race of people in D&D; magic swords are the companions of world-conquering heroes in S&S, just about every adventurer worth the name has one in D&D; and so on.

Two things: Grit and the idea of the 'unnatural'. In D&D, nothing is really 'unnatural', only unexpected (at most). Giant space hamsters, for chrissakes. However, in S&S, pretty much anything that diverges from our world is 'unnatural' and thus inherently weird and horrific. As for grit, in S&S S#!% is HARD. Mud is everywhere, and the thought of covering your whole body in metal is a sci-fi idea. Also, time is meaningful. D&D recaps ages of time like... well, a sourcebook. S&S has time MEAN something. When something is old, that usually indicates that is is very important, probably unnatural in some way. Life is a strong contrast between the vicious and short-lived present and the nigh-undead civilizations that persist past all probability, probably through the help of some kind of horrific magic.

I've always thought of S&S being inspired by vast eons of preliterate or semipreliterate bronze age and iron age eurasia. Think of megalithic cultures, indus valley, bronze age varna, hittites, indoeuropeans conquering ancient cultures, hyperboria, etc etc. Go across to the next valley and you don't know what strange peoples, race or gods await you.

D&D on the other hand I think of as primarily tolkien inspired who in turn was inspired by dark age northern europe in particular. A stock set of races and languages. You may not know for sure what's in the next village, but it will always be the same stock human, elf, gnome, orc, goblin, etc.

D&D came together by borrowing a great many elements from a great many S&S stories as well as heroic fantasy, the relationship between which is not perfectly clear but is vaguely described as antiheroes vs. heroes. D&D has Leiber cities and Tolkein races and Vance spells and on and on.

Thus D&D feels like a pastiche, showcasing a world that contains literally everything under the sun. S&S, meanwhile, is a blanket term describing a variety of different stories, many of which were written in an era where fantasy was practically considered a branch of science/speculative fiction, and thus all had their own little experiments going on. D&D subsequently normalized these experiments, so D&D feels manageable and accessible while S&S stories tend to feel much more exclusive.

All the rules above have been broken by swords and sorcery writers. Hence one of the above stating that "mud" was essential, and another "wind-swept deserts". Scafloc was elf-blooded, and Elric was a member of an ancient Eldritch (elvish) race. Magic can be powerful (and often is) -- and remember, The Mouser was a dabbler in sorcery, too.

Surprisingly, the only rule that, to this day, remains unbroken (in a genre that is always trying to push boundaries and challenge readers) is a resistance to reducing all important struggles to simplistic "good versus evil". Not even suggesting that the difference between high fantasy and S&S is the letters tendency to portray their protagonists as "antiheroes" cuts it, because Jorel of Jiory wasn't exactly an anti-heroine. No, ultimately the big and ONLY CONSISTENTLY difference between S&S and high fantasy is the latter's tendency to coddle the reader with tales that "prove" that "good always overcomes evil". Indeed, in S&S, it is often difficult to tell what good and evil really even mean (or if they are even significant concepts at all!)

With that, D&D -- at least "old school" D&D (up through the last iterations of 2nd edition AD&D rules) -- is highly adaptable to the needs of roleplayers who prefer gritty S&S over what Michael Moorcock called "epic Pooh" (Letterist-influenced high fantasy, a la Tolkien and C.S. Lewis). In fact, I'm running such a game right now, and plan on publishing the house rules we are using to push the rules further away from high fantasy and into the dark realms of S&S.

On that note, one more thing: S&S doesn't alway have to be "dark" and "horrific", and high fantasy doesn't have to be "light" and "coddling". The Silmarillion was indeed depressingly dark at times, and the tales of Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser are quite often humorous!

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.